Results for “free parking”

44 found

A collection of nearly 50 cars that is parked on the streets is revving-up the tempers of neighbors in an unincorporated community of Covina. According to several neighbors and DMV records, the cars belong to 51 year old Mark Shoff who lives in the 16000 block of Kingside Drive.

Shoff keeps five unregistered vehicles in the driveway of his home and at least 43 over vehicles are parked in the neighborhood's surrounding streets.

Here is more and the hat tip goes to the other Duncan Black.

Arnold isn't convinced:

If we abolished free parking, would parking spaces be scarcer? Keep in mind that if the price of parking went up, this would cause movement along the supply curve as well as along the demand curve. Maybe the total number of parking places would decline (it depends on elasticities), but the one result you can predict with certainty is that the number of unused parking places would go up. Is that necessarily welfare-improving?

The key is not to "abolish" free parking, but to a) abolish minimum parking requirements, and b) put prices or higher prices on congested municipal-owned parking spaces.  Both a) and b) will lower the demand for parking and a) will lower the supply of parking, so why should the number of unused parking spaces necessarily go up?  If you treat something as an appropriately scarce resource, it should be used more effectively.

There are plenty of DC restaurants which don't have their own parking lots, but they use paid valet parking and find ingenious ways to store cars more effectively.  The parking fee means that some people walk there or use the Metro, rather than driving and parking.  No one finds this arrangement especially objectionable and while valet parking is at a discount to market still it is priced.  At lunch time valet parking is less likely but still people pay to park, usually in nearby lots.  No one would suggest that these restaurants be forced to put in minimum parking.  Nor would anyone suggest that mandated minimums would be neutral with respect to parking efficiency.

I'm simply asking for the same switch in reverse, namely to do away with minimum parking requirements.  Very likely, such a change will have a bigger impact on future developments than on past developments (it can be hard to reconfigure a parking lot), although some malls might sell off or rent their now-liberated parking spots to other commercial ventures.

Pricing parking on busy residential streets is just common sense S&D and the price should vary with peak times.

Most of all, I am calling for "parking recalculation," so I am surprised Arnold is skeptical.  Maybe he thinks the recalculation won't bring much change (the Wal-Mart in North Dakota may never charge for parking), but in fact we find a wide variety of parking pricing practices around the world and even around the U.S., as laws and institutions and real net prices vary.

You could argue that politics already pushes us to somewhat efficient outcomes for policy, as indeed NYC does usually (though not always) treat parking spaces as more scarce than does Fargo, North Dakota.  Still, there is an obvious chain for political failure.  Development decisions are very often made on a one-by-one, sequential basis.  Other merchants, or nearby homeowners, fear parking overflow and they lobby as if this private cost were actually a social cost.  At each step of development, lots of parties are pushing for minimum parking requirements.  Some "once-and-for-all" parking policy decisions could limit this political incentive. 

Another simple public choice story is this: minimum parking limits the supply of land and boosts the returns to local homeowners.  It raises retail prices but many of the store's customers are from out of town, so that is a vote-winning strategy at the local level, namely scarcer land and higher prices for stores.

People who drive cars also have disproportionately more political power than people who do not, especially in most suburban areas.

Most of the time, legal quantity minimums have real effects on markets and they are not set efficiently at the political level.

Addendum: Here is Arnold's response to Robin, here is Robin on Arnold.  And yet more from Arnold.  And here is an O'Toole comment; for one thing there is free parking in Manhattan, but for another…I never claimed there was.

From the comments: "A note of clarification about free parking in Manhattan. By law meters are prohibited on residential streets. Only on commercial streets and corners are meters allowed. Residential parking permits are also prohibited by the state. This means that in many parts of the island (mostly above 59th street though also in certain areas of lower Manhattan) there is "free" parking at the curb. In these neighborhoods there is substantial cruising for parking. In addition, all of Manhattan was subject to minimum parking requirements until 1982, and now areas north of Central Park (roughly) are subject to minimum parking requirements, as are the other boroughs."

Donald Shoup’s Letter in support of California’s AB 1401 which deregulates parking is a marvel; funny, incisive, economically informed. Brilliant.

California has been waiting for AB 1401 for a long time. In 2005, the American Planning Association published The High Cost of Free Parking, an 800-page book in which I argued that minimum parking requirements increase housing costs, subsidize cars, worsen traffic congestion, pollute the air and water, damage the economy, degrade urban design, encourage sprawl, reduce walkability, exclude poor people, and accelerate global warming. To my knowledge, no city planner has argued that minimum parking requirements do not cause these harmful effects. Instead, a flood of recent research has shown that minimum parking requirements do produce all these harmful results. We are poisoning our cities with too much parking.

Minimum parking requirements are almost an established religion in city planning. One shouldn’t criticize anyone else’s religion, of course, but I’m a protestant when it comes to parking requirements. City planning needs a reformation, and AB 1401 can help.

City planners are placed in a difficult position when asked to set parking requirements in zoning ordinances. They don’t know the demand for parking at every apartment building, art gallery, bowling alley, dance hall, fitness club, movie theater, pet store, tavern, zoo, or hundreds of other land uses. Planners also do not know how much the required parking spaces cost or how the parking requirements affect the cost of housing and everything else. Nevertheless, planners must set the parking requirements for every land use.

Planning for parking is an ad-hoc talent learned on the job and is more a political activity than a professional skill. Despite a lack of theory and data, planners have managed to set parking requirements for hundreds of land uses in thousands of cities—the Ten Thousand Commandments for off-street parking.

…Cities usually require or restrict parking without considering the middle ground of neither a minimum nor a maximum. This behavior recalls a Soviet maxim: “What is not required must be prohibited.” AB 1401, however, is something new. It does not require or restrict parking, and developers can provide all the parking they think demand justifies.

…Minimum parking requirements work against…transit investments. For example, Los Angeles is building the Purple Line under Wilshire Boulevard, which already boasts the city’s most frequent bus service. Nevertheless, along parts of Wilshire Boulevard the city requires at least 2.5 parking spaces for every dwelling unit, even for the smallest apartments. Twenty public transit lines serve the UCLA campus near Wilshire Boulevard in Westwood, with 119 buses per hour arriving during the morning peak. Nevertheless, across the street from campus, Los Angeles requires 3.5 parking spaces for every apartment that contains more than four rooms.

California has expensive housing for people and free parking for cars.

Read the whole thing.